In his essay “The Invitation,” Barry Lopez, a National Book award-winner, describes encountering a grizzly bear eating a caribou.
Reflecting on the experience, Lopez shared that while he saw the bear as a “noun,” Indigenous people, who he was traveling with, saw the bear as a “verb” and would instinctively “situate the smaller thing within the larger thing.” For example, they would notice “trace odors in the air… the sound of brittle brush rattling, [and]… extended the moment of encounter… [to] before we arrived, as well as the time after we left.”
Lopez summarizes how Indigenous people taught him that encountering a “bear” was an invitation, a point of entry, into more fully understanding himself and the world around him.
Sometimes we focus on what is happening in front of us – a conversation, stress at work, bills to be paid – and we forget to zoom out from that moment and to place that “bear” in a larger context of what happened before that moment unfolded, as well as to consider all the possibilities of what could occur after.
Every moment, every “bear,” is an invitation to discern the larger picture and by so doing gain perspective on the bear in front of us and ourselves.
On Emotions 